The Guardians

Identity formation in Borderlands communities is one of this novel’s most overt and important themes, and it connects this text to several of Ana Castillo’s other novels and Chicana literature as a whole. The Chicano movement sought to address inequality and prejudice within mainstream American culture and counter harmful stereotypes that flattened and distorted Mexican American identity. In this novel, Castillo depicts the Borderlands identity as complex, shifting, and multifaceted. She argues that within Mexican American communities, there are many axes of identification and avenues for belonging. Regina identifies as Mexican, Indigenous, and American and locates her sense of self within that space of hybridity. Gabo taps into the region’s religious history and bases his burgeoning identity on his Catholic faith. Rafa eschews Americanism and shies away from anything that might identify him as a “gringo.” Miguel proudly adopts the political identity of the Chicano. Through depicting these four different ways of identifying as Mexican American, Castillo argues that America’s Mexican American community is not a monolith.

Although Regina does not identify with all the politics of Chicanismo, she is aware of her region’s multiculturalism. She thinks critically about the Borderlands’ fraught colonial history and understands that her own family tree contains both Hispanic and Indigenous branches. She observes that she has “indio hair, like [her] mother’s” (98), and she is proud of her heritage. She chooses to live and work in the US, but she derives her sense of self from the way that she moves back and forth between two nations and multiple cultures. There is much about her Mexican childhood that she understands to have shaped her as a person, but she admires the beliefs, values, and practices that she adopted upon moving to the US. For Regina, identity is a hybrid of Mexican, Indigenous, and mainstream American cultures.

Gabo, who has spent his life crossing and re-crossing the US-Mexico border, is also accustomed to living in different cultural communities. As a teenage boy, he is still developing what will become an adult sensibility, and he is drawn to Catholicism as both a religious and cultural identity. Its doctrines guide his moral development, and he devotes himself to living a Christ-like life. Religion provides him solace in the wake of losing both parents, but beyond being a coping mechanism, it gives him purpose, motivating him to preach to his fellow students. “Catholic” also becomes a cultural identity for Gabo. Unlike Regina and Miguel, he is not troubled by the Church’s assimilationist role in Spain’s colonial project in the Americas. He sees Catholicism as a way to tap into his Mexican heritage since Mexican Catholicism became a distinct cultural practice over centuries. Given his own father’s adamant refusal to Americanize, Gabo’s choice to maintain this link to his heritage becomes especially meaningful for him. Rafa, who always maintained that he was “not going to become a gringo and forget who he [was]” (4-5), remains at the forefront of Gabo’s mind, and embracing the religion of his father’s country becomes a way to maintain their severed connection.

Miguel is the novel’s only self-avowed Chicano. For Miguel, identity is inextricably connected to the social and material conditions that shape life in Mexican American communities, and identification thus becomes inherently political. Miguel is interested in the social and economic histories of the US and Latin America and is committed to fighting inequality and injustice. His work to expose the region’s various “dirty wars” and combat environmental racism and class-based oppression in the Borderlands aligns him squarely within the broader Chicano rights movement. For Miguel, identity is thus tied to politics and both social and environmental justice.